Flashman and the Mountain of Disk

Its going to be horses for courses for a while yet

We tend to use storage in different ways and difference in price between spinning rust and SSDs means that they'll almost certainly co-exist for a quite some time to come.

On the rusty side you can buy 2TB SATA disks for £70.

On the flashy side, a 500GB Samsung jobby with set you back over 4 times that.

So if capacity is your thing there is a 16 fold price difference to consider for your average home user.

On the other hand if you want to go quickly then the SSD is clearly the way to go. Having popped an SSD into one of my laptops its amazing how slow the other one now seems.

But things like my photo library and music library are now on external disks, because I can't see any benefit to speeding up the access to these and they use masses of space.

For databases where IOPS and latencies are so important, then flash has so many great attractions, but lots of data isn't accessed often enough to warrant the cost.

Until the cost difference gets low enough that the power savings make SSDs more attractive then my vote will be a mix of the two, each doing their own jobs.

I dont think you get Flash

It's a storage medium. it's orders of magnitudes faster than disk and provides a much more dense storage solution than current disk technologies (delivering the same level of performance, latency and IOPS).

At each iteration - the cost per gigabyte is getting lower. In most cases today, with MLC, you are already on parity with traditional SAS platforms today.

but flash is not the end of the journey. What flash does do, besides just accelerating IO operations, is create highly performant architectures that enables fast adoption of the next storage medium that takes the lead whether it is PCM or optical based storage etc.

I must say that I prefer the old Pan covers...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7247/7731978874_bb48f5c319_z.jpg

The buggers went and changed the covers before I got a full set. A rum lot - publishers.